Data on Early Childhood Education complaints released

Ministry releases data on Early Childhood Education
complaints following requests from ChildForum

6 June
2014

The Ministry of Education has released this week a
summary of data on the number and type of complaints made
against early childhood education services in
2013.

ChildForum chief executive Dr Sarah Farquhar says
this gives an important message to parents, early childhood
services and the public that the Ministry of Education
publicly acknowledges its responsibility and is willing to
handle complaints.

The move comes after sustained pressure
from Early Childhood Network ChildForum, which has been
campaigning for information about complaints to be more
readily available. Last year, ChildForum was given details
of complaints received in 2012, but a similar request in
February this year for data from 2013 was denied as the
Ministry promised the information would be released publicly
in May.

This information has now been published on the
Ministry of Education’s website. However, details of the
complaints including the organisations against which they
were made have not been revealed.

The Ministry says it
received 246 complaints in 2013. It investigated 174 of the
complaints and 79 were upheld. The most common course of
action was a review of the service’s policies and
procedures.

Most of the complaints were regarding fees or
how the service was managed. However, there were 26
allegations of physical or verbal abuse against a child of
which three were upheld and 25 allegations of poor accident
management, including children suffering accidents, or
incidents not being properly reported, of which three were
upheld. There were seven reports of children leaving a
centre unattended due to insecure premises or lack of
supervision, of which five were upheld.

Dr Sarah Farquhar
says the release is a step in the right direction and
greater transparency was vital.

“While it is good that
the Ministry has made a commitment to publish this data
annually, the general nature of the report does not really
make the complaints process more transparent,” she
says.

“Parents have the right to know whether a service
they are considering for their child has been the subject of
a complaint and what was done about it.

“How can parents
truly know that an early childhood service is safe for their
child if they do not know if there have been any major
problems, and if so what consequences the service has faced
and what improvements have been made?”

Dr Farquhar says
the current situation also often led to rumours about which
services were good or bad.

“The Ministry says the
withholding of information is to protect the interests of
services, but by not naming services against which
complaints have been made the Ministry possibly risks
tarnishing the reputation of others which have done nothing
wrong,” she says.

“If a service has dealt with a
complaint adequately it should have nothing to fear from
being named and if the problem hasn’t been investigated or
resolved adequately then the public has a right to
know.”

Dr Farquhar says she will continue campaigning to
increase the information available for parents.

This week,
My ECE, a website designed to help parents understand the
early childhood education sector better, has launched a
survey asking people what they think of the Ministry’s
approach to releasing complaints information and whether
they feel more needs to be done.

The survey is open to
parents, caregivers, and anyone working in the ECE sector
and can be found at www.myece.org.nz

The Ministry of Education’s information release of the
2013 ECE complaints summary is available on its
website.

About ChildForum: ChildForum is the
national ECE network in New Zealand providing fresh
thinking, information, and research on childcare and early
childhood education. Early childhood services across the
sector, employers/managers, educators and parents are
supported by ChildForum. ChildForum’s members also include
teacher educators, researchers, health professionals, and
child advocates. For more information go to www.childforum.com

About My ECE:
This is a website designed to give parents and the
public access to good information about early childhood
education in general and individual early childhood
education services within New Zealand. The website is free
to access and includes listings of ECE services with reviews
and ratings. See www.myece.org.nz

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